This Whole World – Beach Boys

This week’s post goes directly out to Matt Kessler, my friend from Champaign, IL. He’s also one of the creative minds behind Eye Rocket Books. Very original, awesome stuff. He gave me a burned copy of the Beach Boys’ album “Sunflower” where “This Whole World” comes from. It’s an album post Pet Sounds and into the less well-known and popular era of the Beach Boys.

This song contains some of the great elements of classic Beach Boys material and clocks in at less than 2 minutes! It’s a pretty complicated chord progression for a pop song. The verse goes from C major to F major to E minor to G major to A minor, back to F major, to A major to F# minor to B minor to E major to C# minor. All that happens in a matter of less than 30 seconds! Woah… Lots of pop songs are made of 3 chords and don’t change that much. Just goes to show how off the charts these guys were.

I’m particularly proud of this week’s post because I started to work on this months ago and canned it cause it wasn’t going well. But I had to get back to it and it came together quite fast. The vocal harmonies are really layered in the original and saturated with reverb, so I did that too. The lead vocal is doubled or tripled in the original too, so I tracked myself singing the lead part 3 times and mixed them together. The fade out at the end is copied directly from the original. It goes into this incredible acapella vocal break and fades out seconds later. It’s a very weird decision considering it is the climax of the song. Oh well, I guess they knew what they were doing…
Best, Peter (ACA)

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